Reaction to Partnership for 21st Century Skills

I just visited a web page called Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The site offers some many different ways to teach our students that I agree with. Our students will be competing with students from all over the globe for future jobs that requires skills dealing with critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, social responsibility, etc. I loved the idea that Partnership for 21st Century (P21), and its members provide tools and resources to help the U.S. education system keep up by fusing the three Rs and four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation). I was surprised that so far, I didn’t hear anything about test scores. That’s a good thing, if you ask me. Getting students ready for the real world is more important than teaching student’s tricks and some strategies for passing a state run test. Both the schools and the businesses will benefit from this union. Schools will get technology resource, and the businesses get to choose from a pool of experience home grown potential prospects.
I didn’t see anything that I could have disagree with on the site. The implications I see that could come from this are that students will become more exposed to real life situations first hand. That could be an advantage for them on their resume. I could see some teachers balking at this idea, because it’s something different then what they been doing the last twenty plus years. Teachers naturally, get into that comfort zone and don’t want to leave it. I would love it because I love technology. What’s going on now in our classes, is not working too well. So I’m ready for change.

How I Might Use a Blog in My Classroom

The Principal and supervisors are always asking the teachers in every subject area at our school to add more writing assignments in our lesson plans. As I read The Second Edition; ‘Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,” by Will Richardson, he list many classroom uses of weblogs. The one I like for my class is posting prompts for writing on weblogs. I teach at an urban school district in a city that was rank as one of the poorest in the country. I teach math, science and social studies to special education students. My students are always talking about what they download from the internet or what they said on MySpace. Out of the 12 students I have only 1 student doesn’t have a computer with internet access. But that one student has relatives living near him that does. As a homework assignment I could start simple and post on my classroom blog, a writing prompt about reflection of today’s lesson or open ended questions related to one of the lessons they had. I would give credit for just participating. Since each student posting will see every reply to the post, I will allow student to respond to each other. I could talk to other teachers in the school and combine classes and homework weblog writing prompt. Maybe kids in my school will one day deviate from MySpace and spend more time with each other on the homework writing prompt. One requirement is that web lingo can’t be used like “lol” or “btw.”